The Future Leader

2Three Essential Leadership Questions

In order to talk about the future leader, we must first answer three crucial questions about the present-day leader:

• What is leadership and who is a leader?
• Should someone be called a leader or a manager?
• Is the leader of 2030 really going to be that different from the leader of today? And if so, how?

What Is Leadership and Who Is a Leader?

The hardest question for CEOs to answer by far was, “How do you define leadership?” When I asked this question over the phone I would usually get long pauses or comments like “That's a really good question.” But by far the most common response was, “Hmmm, nobody's ever asked me that before.” In my head I would be shouting, “What?! What do you mean, nobody's ever asked you that, you're leading a multibillion-dollar company with thousands of employees!” But of course, I never actually said that, otherwise it would be a rather short phone call. I thought about this for a while and then it started to make sense. We just take the concept of a leader for granted and assume that we all know what that looks like and who is a great leader. It's a bit like trying to define water; it sounds silly, because after all, we all know what water is, right? But how would you define water to someone who has never seen it? Would you just say it's a clear tasteless liquid? Dozens of liquids are clear and tasteless. Leadership is the same; it's everywhere in some form and we experience it daily, whether at work, playing ...